"So let me get this straight...
You want me to go with you...
To visit some geriatric player that cosplays as a reclusive martial artist...
Just because we didn't have a 'training' arc?!
Are FUCKING KIDDING?!?"
The idea, as most catastrophically stupid ideas do, originated with Andrew.
Earlier...
"I've found him," Andrew announced, appearing in the doorway of Caleb's quarters with the look of a man who had either made a groundbreaking discovery or was seconds away from causing a disaster. Knowing Andrew, the odds strongly favored the latter. "The old master. The recluse. I tracked him down."
Caleb did not look up from the ceramite bracer he was polishing. "What old master. What are talking 'bout?"
"The old master. Bro, he's legendary on the forums," Andrew said, like those words alone should have carried the force of divine revelation. He stepped into the room without waiting for permission and dropped a crumpled piece of parchment onto the table with all the ceremony of a priest unveiling sacred scripture.
"His name is Jake Paul. Lives alone in the Gobi-Wan Desert, southeast quadrant of Perditia. Wants nothing to do with civilization. According to the rumors, he hasn't spoken to another player in forty years."
Caleb picked up the parchment.The handwriting was barely legible. At the bottom, someone had drawn a small sun with a smiley face, and underneath it the words: bring suncreen.
"Where the hell did you get this."
"Archer."
Caleb set the parchment down. "I'm not going."
"Bro you need to train, you got dropped to one knee by a Space Wolf."
"He also dropped to one knee."
"Yeah, but he had insane aura doing it," Andrew said, dragging over a chair and sitting on it backward. "Bro, look at us. We're Astartes. Angels of Death. Warriors of the Imperium. And somehow our duel got interrupted by what felt like a sponsored ad break. That is actually diabolical."
"That was Cohen's fault."
"Everything is Cohen's fault. That's not even the issue," Andrew said, waving a gauntleted hand dismissively. "The point is, we still got crazy room for a glow-up here. Imagine the boost to our power levels! We might even reach helmetless Astartes level of power!"
"The point," Andrew said, raising his voice slightly over Caleb's increasingly withering skepticism, "is that Master Jake Paul is said to have reached a level of physical mastery so absurd it's basically mythic. Allegedly, he once deleted an entire ork warband using nothing but a cooking ladle and pure menace energy. No cap."
He leaned forward, eyes bright with completely unearned conviction.
"He could be the key to unlocking our next tier of power. The next level. The real meta."
A pause, for effect.
"And you, my dear younger brother, could become the 666th-generation master of the Dragon Flame Fist instead of just the 666th —"
"I am not the 666th generation anything, you just made that up on the spot."
"—and also," Andrew continued seamlessly, "I already told Commander Robert we were going on a training expedition, and he said, and I quote, 'fine, just don't die too much, I don't want to file the paperwork.'"
Caleb stared at him for a very long time.
"So let me get this straight..."
..
..
..
A 1000 curse words later.
"~Sigh...Pack the water," he said finally.
They left at dawn—Andrew's idea, of course. He had romantic notions about dawn departures, like it added narrative weight or spiritual XP to the journey.
What he hadn't accounted for was that the Gobi-Wan at dawn was still, functionally, a furnace someone had been running since the planet server first booted up.
By the time the sun cleared the horizon, the heat was already there—solid, oppressive, weirdly intentional. It pressed down on them like something with agency, something patient and ancient and fully committed to the bit. Millions of years of practice, and absolutely no plans to stop now.
"It's fine," Andrew said, after approximately forty minutes of walking. "Power Armor has thermal regulation."
"The thermal regulation is working at full capacity and I am still hot, fuck this shit" Caleb said.
"That's because you're generating internal heat from complaining."
"I'm generating internal heat because we are standing in a FUCKING desert."
The Gobi-Wan Desert was a cracked, pale expanse of calcified mineral deposits—centuries of volcanic activity and atmospheric punishment having fused everything into something that looked uncomfortably like the skeleton of a dead ocean.
The horizon shimmered with heat distortion, reality itself seeming slightly overcooked. Now and then, a wind gust slid across the flats and left behind a thin veil of grey ash—the desert's namesake—settling over everything like the world had briefly decided to dust itself and immediately regretted it.
Andrew checked his map, frowned, rotated it ninety degrees, frowned more deeply, and then turned it upside down.
"We are," he announced, "making excellent progress."
"Are we now?"
"Directionally speaking, we are moving through space and time at a consistent rate. We're on the right track bro, don't worry."
Caleb looked at him. "Really? I bet you don't know where we're going."
"I know the general direction," Andrew said, with the confidence of someone who had never once been lost but had been in the wrong location many, many times. "Southeast. The parchment said southeast."
"The parchment had a smiley face sun on it. Archer probably gave it to you for shits and giggles!"
"The smiley face sun was a helpful navigational indicator. It was smiling toward the southeast, if you look at the angle of the—"
"It was a circle with two dots and a curved line, bro."
"A cheerful circle. Which is more than I can say for your attitude right now."
They walked in silence for a while after that, which is to say Caleb walked in silence and Andrew hummed something tuneless and intermittently kicked rocks across the flats for personal entertainment.
At the two-hour mark, they found the skeleton.
It was large—probably human, possibly something adjacent to human—and it was sitting upright against a calcified rock formation in a posture that suggested whoever it had belonged to had sat down for a brief rest and then reconsidered all of their life choices simultaneously. Around its neck hung a small, weathered sign.
Caleb crouched to read it.
Turned back. Not worth it. The old man threw a sandal at me. —Olajide Olayinka Olantunji
He stood back up.
"There's a sign."
Andrew read the sign. He nodded thoughtfully.
"A lesser man would be deterred."
"What kind of man are you?"
"An Astartes," Andrew said, and walked past the skeleton with his chin up, which would have been more inspiring if he hadn't immediately tripped on a rock and caught himself against Caleb's shoulder.
"Didn't see that," Andrew said.
"Mmhmm" said Caleb.
They found the second sign three hours later. It was nailed into a post at what looked like the edge of a long-dried riverbed.
This sign was larger than the first, the lettering sharper, angrier.
WARNING. Master Jake Paul does NOT:
— Accept students
— Accept visitors
— Accept deliveries
— Accept that the Emperor's Tarot should be played with the Triumph cards included (he is WRONG about this)
— Apologize for the sandal incident
Turn back now.
This means you, Logan. You know what you did.
Below that, in a second hand—slightly shakier—someone had added:
Also means you, whoever you are that isn't Logan. He means it. He has more sandals.
Andrew studied the sign in silence for a moment.
"Logan really should've known better."
"Should we—" Caleb started.
"Absolutely not," Andrew said.
And kept walking.
The third sign was personal.
They almost missed it—it was half-buried in ash, only a corner sticking out. Caleb pulled it free and shook it loose.
The message was written in huge, uncompromising letters:
I CAN SEE YOU FROM HERE. GO HOME.
Both of them looked up at the same time.
Far in the distance, through the heat shimmer, was a jagged escarpment—rock formations rising like broken teeth out of the desert floor. And on the highest point, a tiny figure sat perfectly still.
Holding what looked like a cup of tea.
"…He can see us from there?" Caleb asked.
"Apparently," Andrew said.
"That's kind of insane, actually."
"Lowkey," Andrew agreed.
Then he cupped his hands around his mouth—an entirely pointless gesture given the distance, wind, and general physics of the situation—and shouted:
"WE CAME FOR TRAINING!"
No response.
"WE'RE ASTARTES PLAYERS! WE FOUGHT A SPACE WOLF TO A DRAW!"
The figure slowly raised the tea cup.
"…Is that like a greeting?" Andrew asked immediately.
"I think he's ignoring us," Caleb said.
"Nah," Andrew shook his head. "That's acknowledgment. That's basically engagement. We're in."
"That's not what ignoring means."
"Semantic cope," Andrew said, already walking. "He's interested. Let's go."
The climb was not dignified.
The rock face was steep enough that their Power Armor quickly became less "wargear" and more "inconvenient additional gravity," and the calcified stone had the structural integrity of something that had been planning to fall apart for years and was simply waiting for the right excuse. Two fully armored Astartes scrambling up it apparently counted.
Twice, whole sections of rock gave way under Caleb's grip, sending him dropping several meters before he caught himself.
Andrew, attempting a more "efficient" route, discovered that what he had confidently identified as a stable ledge was actually compacted ash held together by optimism and spite. It immediately collapsed, depositing him face-first into the cliff with a resonant clang that echoed across the desert.
"I'm fine," Andrew said, voice muffled, helmet pressed into stone.
"You're stuck."
"I'm adapting."
Caleb hauled him free by the pauldron. They continued upward.
By the time they reached the top, they had been climbing for forty-five minutes of sustained suffering that would have been impressive if anyone had been in the mood to categorize it as such.
They pulled themselves over the final ledge and found a wide, flat platform of rock—wind-swept, clean, almost deliberate in its emptiness.
In the center sat an old man.
Small. Thin in that way certain very old, very dangerous things become thin. His white hair was tied back simply. His robes, once likely plain tan, had been bleached by decades of sun into something almost identical to the stone beneath him.
He held a ceramic cup in both hands.
A small fire burned nearby. A battered iron kettle sat over it, as if it had just finished its only purpose and was now waiting for further instructions.
He looked at them like they were two large raindrops that had landed in his tea.
"No," he said.
His voice was remarkably clear for someone allegedly silent for forty years. Also, it carried the energy of a man who had decided that one syllable was sufficient for most of life's conversations.
Andrew opened his mouth.
"No," the old man repeated, immediately.
"We haven't even—" Caleb tried.
"No."
...
"Master Jake Paul," Andrew began, adopting his most performatively serious tone, "we have traveled many hours through this desert to seek your wisdom. We are students of true martial artists, we—"
"You climbed my mountain wrong," the old man said.
Both of them paused.
"I'm sorry?" Caleb said.
"I watched you," Master Jake said, with the exhausted calm of someone remembering exactly why solitude was a long-term investment. "The big one went face-first into the rock three times. The slightly less big one fell, caught a handhold, then let go of it on purpose to scratch his helmet."
"It itched man" Caleb said.
"The mountain did not respect you," Master Jake replied, "and you did not respect the mountain."
"With respect," Andrew said, "it's mostly ash and it kept collapsing, so—"
"Why are you here?" the old man cut in.
"We got dropped to one knee by a Space Wolf."
"Simultaneously," Andrew added. "Same fight. Shared event. Very humbling."
The old man looked at them for a long time.
Then, slowly, he turned back to his tea.
"The first tent," he said at last, "is around the back. There is firewood. Do not touch my kettle."
Andrew's face lit up like he'd just unlocked a new achievement.
He grabbed Caleb's arm.
"We're in."
"He told us where to sleep," Caleb said flatly. "That's not training acceptance."
"That's onboarding," Andrew said. "That's basically mentorship."
"Forward momentum," Andrew added, already moving.
The tent was a single tent.
To be precise, it was a one-person tent—designed, in a very literal sense, for exactly one average human being who did not wear several hundred kilograms of Power Armor. It had clearly been there a long time. The fabric was faded, the poles slightly warped, and the entrance flap carried a quiet accumulation of names etched into the inner seam.
Logan, Olajide: left on day 3, cannot recommend.
Herschel: didn't make it to the tent, truly a loss.
Yuji: completed training, achieved enlightenment, do not reccomend.
Andrew read them with increasing interest, like he was scrolling through a highly curated review thread.
Caleb, meanwhile, looked at the tent, then at both of their armored frames, and performed a brief, silent calculation that ended exactly as expected.
"We're not both fitting in there," he said.
"We absolutely are," Andrew replied.
He pushed the flap aside and tried to enter. The tent accepted about a third of him, then immediately refused further progress.
"…We just have to adjust," Andrew finished, muffled from inside the fabric.
"You're stuck."
"Nuh uh."
Caleb sat down outside on the rock. The desert sky above them was absurdly clear stars scattered like something spilled and forgotten. Beautiful in the way deserts always are.
Wind moved across the Gobi-Wan flats in long, low sweeps.
"Andrew," Caleb said eventually.
"Mhm."
"Why did you really want to come out here?"
There was a pause. The tent shifted, complained, and then, with a sound like reality giving up, Andrew extracted himself and sat down beside him.
For a moment, he didn't perform. He just looked up.
"Because," Andrew said, more quietly than usual, "if we don't get stronger, people will think the Astartes meta is the weakest, we gotta prove them wrong."
...
"And also because Rivers looked at us like we were rookies, and I hated that."
"Which one is true?"
"Both," Andrew said. "Both is good!"
Caleb nodded slightly.
"In the morning," he said, "he's probably going to make us do something awful."
"Oh, 100%," Andrew agreed, almost pleased.
"And you're going to complain the entire time."
"I will provide real-time optimization feedback," Andrew said solemnly.
Caleb huffed something that might have been a laugh.
"If he throws a sandal at you, I'm not helping."
"I have a helmet," Andrew said. "Worst case scenario, it becomes a percussion instrument."
"Best case you do some aura farming!"